Noting/negating/negotiating voices

Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 82, 2011

2007

2011

Revista de Educación (Madrid)

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Linguistics and Education, 2006

Book review Whose voice as process? Voice as Process, L.A. Bryant. Boynton/Cook Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH (2005). xiii + 142 pp., ISBN: 0-86709-577-6 (alk. paper) Voice as a Process reports Bryant's study of what students do with the "varying types of voices they bring to [her] classroom and the voices the academy asks them to employ" (p. 8). Foundational to this study were several values: student-centered pedagogy, social constructionism, and postcolonialism. Through her study, Bryant came to understand voice not only as product but also as process-"a process of navigating, negotiating, rejecting, and integrating, building hybrid voices" (p. 7). She claims "Reconstructing voice as a process opens up possibilities for teachers and writers that permit teachers to engage in better teaching practices by freeing them prescriptive notions of voices" (p. 11). In Bryant's explanation of her interest in doing this study, she reflects on a college writing course in which she worked to squelch students' sexual innuendoes. Later, she came to a different interpretation of these innuendoes, viewing them as "less about sex and inappropriate voices and more about disruption and students' attempts to enter the discourse being controlled by the instructor" (p. 18). Although her initial reaction to the sexual innuendoes was to silence them, she later admits, "It is difficult to silence a voice" and asserts, "My answer-let that voice speak" (p. 84). Consequently, Bryant considers what else she could have done in response to the sexual innuendoes. This study documents the resulting change in her teaching and her students' writing. Bryant's first case study is of Jason. Jason brought to his college writing voices that Bryant names as academic and home/community/colloquial, terms she seems to use almost interchangeably. She also identifies his voice as a political scientist. It is the colloquial voice, however, that proved to be the most troubling for Bryant because it included "vulgar words" and "irreverent humor" (p. 24). Instead of silencing this voice, though, Bryant asserts that it is her job to "provide opportunities to encounter voices" so that Jason could "negotiate with these voices" (p. 28). Ultimately, Bryant found that by supporting Jason as he took risks and experimented with voices in his writing she helped him to use all of his voices with varying intensity in various assignments. The most developed case study is that of Leah. Leah, as the daughter of a published poet, came to college with a strong writing voice, albeit one Bryant identifies as that of a storyteller rather than that of a college student or academic. Throughout Leah's college career, Bryant documents Leah's construction of voices. Bryant makes a compelling argument that Leah shifted positions and voices not in a linear way but in a more web-like fashion, integrating various voices-storyteller, barnyard, tutoring, college writing, and academic. Leah sometimes foregrounded one voice and other times another, and there were times when voices collided, provoking Leah to use strategies

Teaching and Teacher Education, 1997

This is a story about how "Guri," a high school student, constructs meaning about a poem, aided and assisted by her interactions with her two peers in a response group, as well as starting a process of mastery of a literary genre expected in the Norwegian secondary school system. It is based on three years of field work by the teacher/researcher in Guri's class. The theoretical framework for this study are the theories inspired by Vygotsky, Bahktin and their followers.

Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 44, 2, pp. 112–123, part of special issue "Analyzing voice in educational discourses", 2013

This introduction to the special issue Voice in Educational Discourses introduces the concept of voice (1) as the actual discourse to work with in ethnographies of education; (2) as a heuristic to investigate the ways in which different educational actors make sense of school life; (3) as a problem to make oneself heard; (4) as a methodological tool for empowerment; and (5) as a vision of education and society.

Curriculum Inquiry, 2006

Every way of thinking is both premised on and generative of a way of naming that reflects particular underlying convictions. Over the last 15 years, a way of thinking has reemerged that strives to reposition students in educational research and reform. Best documented in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States, this way of thinking is premised on the following convictions: that young people have unique perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling; that their insights warrant not only the attention but also the responses of adults; and that they should be afforded opportunities to actively shape their education. Although these convictions mean different things to different people and take different forms in practice, a single term has emerged to capture a range of activities that strive to reposition students in educational research and reform: "student voice." In this discussion the author explores the emergence of the term "student voice," identifies underlying premises signaled by two particular words associated with the term, "rights" and "respect," and explores the many meanings of a word that surfaces repeatedly across discussions of student voice efforts but refers to a wide range of practices: "listening." The author offers this discussion not as an exhaustive or definitive analysis but rather with the goal of looking across discussions of work that advocates, enacts, and critically analyzes the term "student voice." Every way of thinking is both premised on and generative of a way of naming that reflects particular underlying convictions. Over the last 15 years, a way of thinking has reemerged that strives to reposition school students in educational research and reform. 1 Best documented in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States, this way of thinking is premised on the following convictions: that young people have unique perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling; that their insights

Journal of Teacher Education, 2006

2014

This paper offers a genealogy of dialogic education, tracing its origins in Romantic epistemology and corresponding philosophy of childhood, and identifying it as a counterpoint to the purposes and assumptions of universal, compulsory, state-imposed and regulated schooling. Dialogic education has historically worked against the grain of standardized mass education, not only in its view of the nature, capacities and potentialities of children (and therefore of adults as well), but in its economic, political and social views, for which childhood is understood as a promissory condition. Dialogic education is oriented to what Dewey called “a future new society of changed purposes and desires,” made possible by an emergent form of social character. It has followed its own developmental trajectory from its origins in Pestalozzi’s Rousseau-inspired innovations, through anarchist theory and practice and the Progressive Education movement, to its current most salient formulation in the Democratic Education movement, whether as an enemy within the gates of standardized education or as expressed in innumerable alternative forms of schooling or unschooling. The paper highlights several key characteristics, gleaned from all those forms, of the dialogic school—identified as intentionality, transitionality, emergence, aesthetic temporality, interdisciplinarity and group governmentality--and argues further that community of philosophical inquiry theory and practice as a form of post-Socratic group dialogue that emerged in the 1970’s, is a pedagogical praxis that offers a grand operational template for dialogic education as a form of schooling